"The 9/11 Kid"

By Jodie Morse

Hilary Strauch is a 12-year-old whose favorite TV channel is the Food Network. It's not that she's particularly fond of cooking--she doesn't make much beyond cake from a box--but after a year of careful study, she's found that it's the one station that doesn't show her father's murder.

Watching the news is clearly out of the question. So is mtv, which also airs footage of the tumbling World Trade Center. Even the kid-friendly Animal Planet ran a feature on rescue dogs that sifted through debris at ground zero. "Emeril is my favorite because he's so funny and distracting," says Hilary. "I don't care so much about what he actually cooks, just that he never says anything about Sept. 11."

Losing a parent is hellish in any instance. Hilary had the added horror of seeing hers vanish, suddenly and surreally, on TV. That morning her father George called home twice from his office at the insurance broker Aon on the 99th floor of the south tower--once calmly, the second time choking on tears--to assure her mother Ginny that he was O.K. and was being evacuated. Several hours later, Hilary, watching TV along with the rest of her sixth-grade class, saw one of the endless replays of her father's office building collapsing in a heap.

From that moment forward, her grief unspooled on a public stage, and everyone wanted a hand in her recovery. Strangers sent their sympathy wrapped in handmade quilts, Lego sets and VIP passes to U.S. Space Camp and Bruce Springsteen concerts. One day a shaky Mary Tyler Moore went on cnn to read a poem by an Aon employee detailing how Hilary's dad had talked to co-workers about his daughter. In her hometown on the Jersey Shore, Hilary was instantly cast as "the 9/11 kid." Students in her school either acted cloyingly sweet or parted ways when they saw her coming. This spring her teacher even pulled her aside and told her, "You're my hero."

In private there were assigned roles as well. Her mother was often the one who needed mothering. When Hilary attended a bereavement camp, the only place where she felt understood, even there she adopted a distinct persona: she was the most eloquent about her grief--"definitely top of the class," says camp director Lynne Hughes--and all the counselors longed to have her in their healing group. "I think it feels a little like being schizophrenic or being a character in a play who's totally different from you," Hilary says. "You have all these faces. There's one you show the people you don't know very well because if they saw the real you, it would be pretty ugly. And there's another you show to people you really, really know, like your mom."

The question is, when you're 12 years old and living and grieving in a fishbowl, which face do you show yourself?

Death, a stranger in any child's cosmos, seems grossly alien in Hilary's. She lives in a pale-yellow house a block from the ocean in Avon-by-the-Sea, N.J. The tiny town is a summer beach destination--Ginny met George on the boardwalk when she was just 17 and both were working menial hotel jobs--with a year-round population of slightly more than 2,000. Yet even in the off-season Avon retains a certain lazy, carefree air. Sweeping front porches serve as social hubs. Traffic grinds to a halt so that ducks can meander across the street. Underemployed policemen ride around on bicycles and hand out "citations" for good behavior, redeemable for free sugar cones at Beach Plum Homemade Ice Cream.

Hilary has always been one of the most frequent offenders. She began life as "the miracle baby"--Ginny tried for nearly a decade to get pregnant and finally succeeded shortly after her 36th birthday. Hilary is tall for her age and trim, with fair, freckled skin and a froth of red curls so striking that strangers stop her on the street for her autograph, insisting that she must be an actress from a Broadway production of Annie. This year, as in every other, she earned straight A's. She competes in five sports (ranking statewide in swimming), plays the piano and, in her free time, strings rosaries to give to the poor. "My life was totally set," she says. As a grownup, she planned on a two-pronged career: she would work for several decades as a patent attorney and then cash out at age 50 and teach in an inner-city elementary school. She would then move back into her childhood home because by that time, "my parents would be very old, and old people live in small houses without steps." They would have to buy the single-story ranch house next door.

And here's the true miracle: she is thoroughly unaffected. She speaks up in class but doesn't flaunt her knowledge. She has the rare ability, unsettling in an adolescent, to bob among different social circles, equally at ease with the bookworms, the jocks and the special-needs kids and, like many other only children, with adults as well. "Often when I'm around her, she's so mature that I completely forget and hear myself talking like she's one of my girlfriends," says family friend Maureen Farrington. But in other ways, Hilary is refreshingly juvenile. Her room is an absolute disaster zone, the carpet barely visible among empty ginger-ale cans and discarded Old Navy outfits. She moans about her braces; when she's excited about something, she jumps up and down and tugs on the arm of the nearest adult.

"There's absolutely nothing of me in her," jokes Ginny. Then she pauses and twirls her own schoolgirl red curls. "O.K., these came from me, but in every other way, she is a patch off her father." Indeed, the two were so stunningly similar in physique and temperament that her father's friends find it a little spooky to be in her presence. Both were lean and lanky with broad shoulders built for the butterfly stroke; and both whip-smart but very tightly wound. Though students couldn't enter the science fair until the sixth grade, George and Hilary had spent the past year scouring the Internet for the perfect project. "For a lot of years, I was basically just the team manager for the two of them and stood in the background and watched," Ginny says.

The laid-back leg of the threesome, Ginny quit her job as a high school English teacher after Hilary was born, and now works two days a week at the Avon public library. She is the one who races around to the parade of after-school lessons and practices. George had a grueling commute--two hours each way, leaving on the 5:35 a.m. train--but on evenings and weekends he was all Hilary's, supervising homework assignments, shooting hoops. You can see the closeness of the father-daughter bond in the photographs around Hilary's room. Hilary and George skiing, kayaking, golfing and eating chocolate cake. In one image, yellowing a bit from age, she is a preschooler, sitting in a red-and-green plaid dress at her father's desk at the World Trade Center. It was taken on one of her favorite days of the year, Dec. 23, when she was his official date to the annual Aon Christmas party and got to commute with him on the train.

In Hilary's world, no one had ever been seriously ill, let alone died. Indeed, it was such a blue-sky existence that George and Ginny had begun to worry about how their daughter would react when she finally faced a loss. In the spring of 2001, they started gingerly preparing her for what they thought would be the first death in the family: their 17-year-old, half-deaf cat Clancy.

What is everyone looking at?" Hilary asked Maureen Farrington on the morning of Sept. 12. Friends and relatives had descended on her house, and Farrington volunteered to distract Hilary with a day at the beach. Farrington, a peppy, blond social worker, assured Hilary that people were probably gawking, as they very often did, at her adopted Korean daughter Elizabeth, 2. But Hilary wasn't buying it; she kept wondering aloud why anyone might have reason to watch her. The rest of the time, she blithely skipped about the beach and collected shells with Elizabeth.

On one level, Hilary understood what had happened--the crumbling-towers sequence was seared in her memory--but she chose instead to believe her father's last words: I'm fine. He of all people must have known how to find the emergency exits. A safety engineer by training and an executive in risk management at Aon, George was almost comically consumed with accident prevention. He evangelized about helmets and seat belts; he even had a decibel meter that he used to measure loud music lest anyone perforate an eardrum. Hilary's dad was just a little late getting home. Maybe he was buried in the rubble, suffering from amnesia, or his cell phone was broken. Sometimes even engineers had mechanical failures.

Later that week, Ginny suggested that they donate some of George's undershirts and Argyle socks to the rescue workers. "What about when he comes home?" asked Hilary, who had said almost nothing to her mother since the towers had fallen. Ginny, who had nearly shut down from the shock, followed Hilary's lead: "Then obviously we'll buy him some more."

Hilary made it known that she would be sticking to her routines--most important of all, school. She had taken just two days off and was eager to get back. "When I walked in, everyone spread out in two rows in the hallway, like I had food on my face or something," she says. During her brief hiatus, her classmates did nothing but talk about how they should act when she returned. A few offered clumsy condolences, likening her plight to that of a distant relative's dying. One friend said she knew exactly how Hilary felt because her parents were getting divorced. Someone thought the kids should start clearing out their piggy banks to raise money for victims' families; over the next five days, the class amassed 68,000 pennies.

But mostly everyone tiptoed around her. "No one really knew what to do," says her friend Joey Tardiff. "We just started acting overnice." The posturing made school excruciating. So Hilary employed her own bit of social artifice: she began acting like nothing whatever was wrong. She turned in every assignment on time with her usual fastidiousness. When kids spoke about their fathers, she interjected stories about hers (sometimes in the past tense, sometimes not). If it seemed appropriate, she affected just the right measure of grief. "Even if I was happy, I'd make myself feel just a little bit sad even if I didn't really want to," she says, "because it's how I think I was supposed to be." And no matter how empty she felt, she never ever lost it in public. Before long, teachers were marveling at how well she was coping.

Home was another matter. Hilary couldn't fall asleep in her own bed and started climbing into Ginny's. She was having bad dreams--a recurring nightmare from when she was very young about her house burning to the ground with the three of them trapped inside. Hilary had also taken to blaming herself for her dad's disappearance and was preoccupied with guilty thoughts. "I kept thinking that if the cat had gotten sick or I'd gotten sick that morning, he wouldn't have gone to work," says Hilary. She had seen students at her school have violent asthma attacks. If only her lungs had closed up on Sept. 11, she thought.

For her part, Ginny was going through the motions but nothing more. Friends and relatives, who had colonized the house, were propping her up like a marionette and pulling her through the paperwork mill. "I was numb, hollow," says Ginny upon several months' reflection. "I was just completely terrified, terrified of living the rest of my life without George--still am, but in the beginning I couldn't do a thing."

On Sept. 21, Patty Tardiff got a call from Ginny, who sounded more terrified than usual, almost as if she had seen a ghost. "I just got a dozen beautiful red roses for my 27th wedding anniversary," said a winded Ginny. Then there was a long pause. "They're from George." But it was clear from the loopy cursive who had really sent them, along with the following message:

Dear Ginny, I love you and I am always with you and Hilary. You are still strong and I love you a lot. We will always be GG&H. Geo

The roses were just the beginning. Hilary threw her mother a full-blown anniversary party. "Fancy dinner at the dining-room table, Lenox china, the whole deal," says Ginny. Several friends showed up and, with Hilary's help, prepared salad and Dijon chicken. Hilary flitted about the party like the consummate hostess and, toward the end of the evening, produced several presents for her mother: linen Halloween dish towels, scented candles, and Nexxus shampoo and conditioner. Not knowing what else to do, the adults played along with the charade.

Three days later was the first of George's three memorial services, sponsored by Aon and held at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan. The next two were in New Jersey: one at St. Elizabeth's Church in Avon, where Ginny and Hilary worship every Sunday, and the last at the Protestant church that George had attended growing up. Since there was still no sign of a body, Ginny propped up a framed photo of George on the altar: he was basting a Thanksgiving turkey and grinning ear to ear. At the receptions afterward, Hilary was the one grinning. Again she played hostess, making animated small talk with different clusters of relatives.

Ginny was hearing mixed messages: on the one hand, Hilary's sixth-grade teacher, Michael Sanderson, called home with glowing reports about her latest perfect test score. But friends and relatives were becoming increasingly worried. Why did Hilary avert her eyes every time the subject of her father came up? What was behind the cheery facade? Why did she never ask why? Ginny scheduled several appointments with a psychiatrist, Gail McVey. She and Hilary talked mostly about books--Hilary and Ginny read one or two a week--and about memories of her father. After four visits, McVey gave Hilary a Harry Potter journal in which to jot down her feelings and told Ginny, "You have a remarkable daughter. She talks all about her father ... She can keep seeing me if she likes, but she's doing so well, I'm not sure it's necessary."

The facade was at least in part for her mother's benefit. "The last thing I wanted to do was anything to make my mom more upset," says Hilary. She worried about what Ginny would think if she got too emotional or, conversely, if she appeared to be having too much fun. Hilary stopped playing the piano and didn't pick it up again until the spring. Normally well behaved, she began asking permission to do even the most absurdly trivial things, such as riding her bike around the block or flying a kite. One day Hilary forgot to pack her Speedo for her practice with the Monmouth Barracudas, the highly selective regional swim club she belongs to. Scared of her mother's reaction, she soaked her hair in the sink to make it look as though she had participated and swore Patty, who was carpool mom that day, to secrecy. "Please, let's just pretend everything is fine," she begged.

Hilary had good reason to be concerned: her mother wasn't eating. Ginny had a gag reflex every time she put food in her mouth. Some mornings she was unable even to brush her teeth without thinking she would vomit. About the only thing she could force down was Carnation Instant Breakfast--the same thing she gave Hilary after the orthodontist tightened her braces. Ginny was slender to begin with from years of power walking, but now the weight was melting off her twiggy body. By December she had lost 29 lbs. In hopes that humor might defuse some of the pain, friends started calling her the "Incredible Shrinking Woman." Sanderson took a somewhat sterner approach. He paid a call one day during lunch and sat on the porch with Ginny. "You're just wasting away," he told her. "You have to take better care of yourself."

While many widows were clinging to support groups and touring ground zero, Ginny bunkered down and hardly left the immediate environs of Avon. She had, and still has, no desire to see the site. ("What would I want with construction dirt?" she is fond of asking. "It's not my husband.") In part, she was sluggish with grief. But there was something else tethering her to home. Ginny has a terrible sense of direction--on top of everything else, George had been the family compass--and she was petrified of losing her way. Then one day Hilary's principal called to say he had heard about a special daylong grief camp for 9/11 victims: Comfort Zone Camp, based in Richmond, Va. Originally created for children who have lost loved ones, Comfort Zone rallied to set up satellites in New York and New Jersey just after Sept. 11. The first session was virtually next door to the northern New Jersey hamlet where Ginny had grown up. It was one of the few places on earth she knew she could find from memory.

So on Nov. 10, Hilary and Ginny rose early to give themselves plenty of travel time and embarked on their first mother-daughter trip. They found the place with no problem. The counselors announced they would be splitting up the widows and children for the day. (There were no widowers in this group.) As they went their separate ways, Ginny whispered to Hilary that at any time she could ask to be excused, and they would leave. The offer proved unnecessary; Hilary had her best day since Sept. 11. It was the first time she could really talk to kids her own age. Or she could not talk at all and play foursquare or just act silly. At the end of the day, they sat cross-legged in a "healing circle" and were invited to share a story about their fathers. At first, they all looked at their shoes. Then, just as she did at school whenever the teacher looked desperate, Hilary confidently spoke up, volunteering, "My dad was known for his Argyle socks, and we donated some of those socks to the rescuers at ground zero." She felt an immediate rush; soon the other kids were eagerly relating memories of their fathers.

Ginny felt emboldened as well: "It was the first time I'd actually identified myself with 9/11 and met anyone else who lost their husband that day. There were 40 widows there, and some of them broke my heart. There was a lot of anger, a lot of unsifted emotion, but nothing I said there was wrong. I felt very safe." Both mother and daughter were thoroughly drained by the day, but the first thing Hilary said to Ginny was, "I can't wait for the next camp!"

Ginny still dismissed most of the 9/11 events and invitations that crowded her mailbox. But she could not resist two free tickets to a Dec. 7 Bruce Springsteen concert at Convention Hall in Asbury Park, N.J. She and George had been fans from the very beginning, back when Springsteen was just a local bar act, and they relished any opportunity to see him live. It was only fitting that his should be Hilary's first rock concert. Hilary and Ginny were seated in the 9/11 section, and it was clear that the women with puffy eyes hadn't worn all black simply to be fashionable. The widows had come to a wake, and the minute the music started, they were bawling. But Ginny was determined to have a good time on their first night out in months. She sang all the words and pulled Hilary up out of her seat so they could dance. "Hilary kept turning around and looking at the women crying and asking me, 'Are you sure we're allowed to do this? Are you sure we're allowed to be dancing?'" recalls Ginny. "Nothing was going to spoil her first rock concert. I said, 'We're dancing because this is what people do at a Bruce show,' and we danced together for the whole night without looking back."

It was one of the last bright moments of 2001. December brought the memory of myriad traditions--the lighting of the tree in Rockefeller Center, the annual Avon hayride, the Aon party at the World Trade Center--that Hilary used to share with her father. As with everything else, she insisted things proceed as usual, even if a male cousin or a friend's father had to act as an understudy, and then regretted it the second the event started. One of Hilary's favorite parts about Christmas was her father's ineptitude with gifts. Ginny was in charge of the present buying, but George usually made a token purchase of his own. One Christmas he surprised Ginny with an electric pencil sharpener. "They were always so clearly the wrong thing, but it was just so funny that he'd taken the time and thought to buy them," says Hilary, who one year received a stuffed dolphin with tie-dyed fur. "When I came down for Christmas this year, something was very off. For the first time in my life, I had gotten every single thing I wanted, and then I really knew it."

It had taken a little more than three months, but her father was finally dead.

On Jan. 15, Ginny got a letter from the medical examiner's office. George's toothbrush and dirty T shirt that she had submitted the previous fall did not have enough genetic material to make a match. The examiner needed additional DNA from a child or sibling. Ginny could not face taking her daughter to the Manhattan morgue where the parts of so many husbands and fathers were being stored in refrigerated trailers, so she opted to have the DNA kit sent to their home. It arrived on Valentine's Day.

The procedure was simple enough. Hilary and Ginny both wiped the insides of their cheeks with cotton-tipped wooden swabs--Ginny, so that her DNA could be isolated from George's--and sealed them in cardboard boxes. When they were finished, Ginny asked:

"Do you want them to find a body?"

"I don't know," said Hilary. "What do you want?"

"I hope and pray he just vaporized, is one with the universe and never knew what hit him."

"Me too."

Then they moved on to another topic, ending their first discussion of George's remains.

Around this time, Hilary arrived home from school with a poem she had written in class. Until Sept. 11, she had been a prolific writer. She had always kept several diaries going and even had one of her fifth-grade poems published in a national anthology. But whenever she tried to write about her father, she felt either blocked or distracted. At long last, the words had come:

My Dad I see a face, a face of God He's smiling down on me and my mom. My dad is up there smiling too. When his tower collapsed he was trapped Inside a fiery inferno with nowhere to go Except heaven.

Since she had accepted that her father was not returning, Hilary had been thinking more about him. She summoned memories of him--the time the previous August when he finally agreed to go boogie boarding, their trips to Philadelphia to hear the symphony orchestra--and replayed them in her head. And she thought a lot about what he was doing now. "In heaven he has everything he's ever wanted," she says. "There's no work and lots of golf, and I'm sure there's a beach. And he spends his time doing all the dangerous things he never let me do, like jumping up and down on a trampoline."

While privately Hilary was having what she calls "moments of realization about my dad," she was more conflicted about her public role. She and Ginny had gone on an all-expenses-paid trip sponsored by the rock band Creed to the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. She met Brian Boitano and Senator Orrin Hatch and was even serenaded by Creed onstage. When NBC was looking to interview someone about the trip, Hilary's hand shot up. Back in Avon, she went from charity case to celebrity. In no time the whole school had seen the tape of her interview. "Everyone started sucking up to me and telling me how cool I was for getting to do these things and how they wish they'd gotten to go too," she says. They likened it to winning a radio call-in contest. The pangs of guilt returned: What was she doing profiting from her father's death? "They didn't understand the price," she said.

By spring she was out of synch with her friends. Not only could she still not be candid about the one thing on her mind, but while her world had disassembled, everyone else's was seamlessly pressing forward. Some girls had discovered boys, but she still saw herself as kind of a tomboy. One of her closest confidants was a 32-year-old FBI agent she had met at bereavement camp. Hilary had never before cared about social machinations because she had never had to. Now she was suddenly self-conscious and wondering why she had chosen this moment to worry about what other people thought.

Her peers were not the only ones who could make her feel ill at ease. Sanderson, her teacher, clearly had only the best intentions, but sometimes he was no better than the news anchors who kept harping on Sept. 11. During the last week of May, he brought a TV into class so that everyone could see the ceremony marking the completion of the ground-zero cleanup. Hilary wore her brave face and watched along with everyone else. Afterward, Sanderson asked if he could see her in the hallway. "You're my hero," he said. "You've just been so outstanding in front of your peers all year. I want to cry right now." So did she--out of utter embarrassment.

Hilary, who had always lived for school, could not wait for it to be over. She was counting on the fact that she could be anonymous among her summer friends, who lived elsewhere during the year and would not have heard about her dad. During the final week of the school year, the town of Avon gathered for its 22nd annual buffet dinner to reward young athletes. The affair holds little suspense--all the players get a certificate in every sport in which they compete--but Hilary was nonetheless excited and asked Ginny if she could wear a smudge of her glittery pink lip gloss. Sanderson, who also coaches Hilary's basketball team, took the stage and nervously riffled through a stack of note cards. He started off by talking about Lisa Beamer and the crash of Flight 93. Then he said, "Those passengers taught us all something about victory... And this season, you girls have taught me something about victory. You never moaned or groaned or complained, and by continuing to fight on the court, you helped us all forget a little about what happened to this nation on Sept. 11."

Shortly afterward, Hilary told me she had resigned herself to a certain kind of grim fame: "I've heard about people having their 15 minutes. I think I've had a little more than 10, and I'm done with it. But I don't think it will stop. Maybe someday when I get older, get a job and move away from Avon, maybe at that point I won't be that different from anyone else."

Ginny steeled herself for the summer. Now that her numbness had lifted, she could finally focus on the mounds of paperwork that needed her attention. The deadline to apply for the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, a topic she does not discuss with Hilary, was weighing on her. But there was a flip side to emerging from her fog: she actually had to think and feel. The summer had always been her favorite part of the year. It was when she and George had met and fallen in love. And during July and August, they inhabited what Ginny calls an "expandable house," the weekend destination for every last cousin or friend seeking refuge from the sweltering city. Hilary would expect the same this year. Could they possibly be up to it?

On the first official day of summer, Ginny was hooking up the sprinkler system in her garden when she nearly tripped over the family's younger cat, Timothy, who had collapsed in a lifeless heap. Hilary was not around, so Ginny slid him into the cat carrier and sped off to the animal hospital. After rounds of tests, the vet could not say what precisely was wrong, only that the problem looked terminal. On the theory that "if [Hilary] couldn't control her dad's death, here was one she could," Ginny left the decision making in her daughter's hands. A five-night vigil at the hospital ensued. Hilary sat for hours patiently brushing Timothy and offering him tiny morsels of cat food on her finger. Finally the vet told her that the animal was not getting any better. Hilary thought for an hour and said that Timothy should be put to sleep.

"Do you want his body back?" asked the vet.

"I don't think so," said Hilary.

"What about his ashes?"

"No, I just want this all over."

Hilary said she would like to say goodbye. Fifteen minutes later, she emerged sobbing so hard she couldn't breathe. "It's unfair," she said that night for the first time since Sept. 11. "Why did this happen to me?"

Summer had always peaked over the Fourth of July. It was the one weekend when the whole family made a point of congregating in Avon at the same time. Ginny had an uncle who was a veteran of World War II, and every year, usually on July 5 or 6, the local chapter of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) marching band played on her front lawn. This year, after an FBI terrorism warning sent people scrambling for a refuge from Manhattan, relatives began arriving a day or two earlier than usual.

The guests declared a news blackout for the long weekend. If nothing else, they could filter out the overt mentions of Sept. 11. Yet George's absence was glaring at every turn. He had done the grilling, hung the flag, made sure the cooler was always stocked. The role of substitute patriarch fell to one of his fraternity brothers, George Eidam, who had come with his wife Marti and only child Mark, just six weeks older than Hilary. The Fourth went off without a hitch. Hilary spent an exhausting afternoon at the beach with George and Mark and could barely keep her eyes open for the fireworks.

The next day, Hilary crashed. On the beach, she was listless and wrapped herself up like a mummy in pink towels. She did not touch her chicken wrap and stormed home after lunch. The beach crowd fumbled for an explanation. Perhaps she was just tired. Or it was hormones. Or for once she was being a surly teenager. When Ginny later went up to the house, Hilary was in bed underneath the quilt, engrossed in a pbs documentary about dwarfs triumphing in the face of their handicap. "Hanging around with Uncle George and Mark just keeps reminding me that I don't have my dad," she said. That evening George took Ginny aside and offered to pack up and leave. "It will break my heart, but if it's too hard for Hilary, we'll go," he said. There was no doubt in Ginny's mind that they would stay.

Shortly before noon the next day, the VFW buses started rolling in. The band members, who in past years had always worn grubby T shirts and cutoffs, marched in their official uniforms, with muskets and all. After finishing a set of patriotic standards, the band made a special presentation in George's honor of one of the ornate, 3-ft.-high floral wreaths the vfw places on the tombs of soldiers.

As the summer ripened, hilary and Ginny took some cautious steps into the rest of their lives. They have new routines, such as "girls' nights out" for pizza, and are talking about a trip to Ireland next year. They had their first big fight. (Ginny would not allow Hilary to take the surfing lessons her father had promised.) "My friends say this is progress, talking back like a typical teenager," sighs Ginny. For her part, Ginny is less jittery behind the wheel thanks to her new $3,000 global positioning system; an automated voice supplies step-by-step directions to anywhere she wants to travel. Yet press even the slightest bit on this scene, and the crater opens up. There are the occasional spooky reminders of George, like the solicitors who call for him or the monthly Verizon bill that arrives in his name. Hilary still spends some nights in her mother's bed. Though she talks about her father much more freely, she does so without making eye contact and often slipping her tortoiseshell sunglasses on. She rarely discusses her dad with her summer friends.

And she is still trying on different faces, still hoping for the right fit.

On a Sunday in early August, Hilary and Ginny drive to another Comfort Zone Camp, where the topic of the day is the anniversary. The parents and the children divide into separate groups, but the feeling is the same in both rooms: we will not hang our grief on any timetable. The mothers spend a portion of the afternoon discussing wedding rings. About half, including Ginny, still have theirs on; a handful now also wear their husband's wedding band. The children worry about having to watch the towers fall during the television coverage of the anniversary. Hilary shares her anxiety with the group: "When people talk about it on TV, they know everything about it before you do, even though it's your dad and they have no connection to him."

A small media contingent is present, and during a break MSNBC asks Hilary whether she would mind doing a quick interview. The reporter asks about her father and about how she has changed in the past year. Afterward, the crew members compliment her poise in front of the camera.

The segment is set to air Sept. 11. Hilary has decided not to watch.